On the evening of May 24, my phone started buzzing with calls and WhatsApp messages. It was the day the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) conducted the first-stage, or preliminary, examination. Having mentored students for several years in UPSC preparation, I stay in regular touch with them. At night, in stoic silence, I started reading all the texts, responding to the missed calls, and listening to the voice notes. The comments: “Sir, tell me, is there any course available on Vedas or Upanishads?” “Sir, I think I need to do a doctorate on the Vedas.” “Sir, I think I am done with the UPSC! I can’t clear it in this lifetime!” There was one thing in common: all the calls, messages, and voice notes expressed the disenchantment of students with this year’s prelims paper.

The UPSC examination has never been just a routine exam to gain entry into the elite bureaucracy. India is deeply fractured by gender, caste, religion, region, geography, race, and class, and the UPSC exam represents hope. It serves as a mechanism for students to transcend intergenerational and intragenerational divides; it is an instrument of mobility and equalisation. It serves as a democratic engine, enabling candidates from the remotest parts of the country to compete on a level playing field with elite, English-speaking university graduates.

The UPSC aims to select “generalist administrators”, defined not by the singularity of over-specialisation, but by a broader understanding of public policy, analytical depth, and a commitment to constitutional secularism. Indian novels like Raag Darbari, Bara, and English August offer a glimpse of the challenges these administrators face: political pressures, administrative paralysis, cultural disconnect, and much more. These broader understandings help the administrators to navigate them skillfully under the protective cover of the Constitution. That promise is slowly fading and has received a severe jolt this year.

The Preliminary Examination (General Studies Paper I) conducted recently marks a structural mutation in the exam’s design. It makes a complete conceptual shift away from the basic UPSC motto of testing a candidate’s originality, critical thinking, and administrative adaptability and replaces it with postgraduate-level pedantry, obscure scriptural literalism, and deliberate semantic gymnastics. It systematically dismantles the role of logical deduction and educated reasoning. The paper demonstrates a “casino effect” in public recruitment.

The paper penalises students who adopt a deep, systematic preparation methodology, and gives the impression of an institutional lottery. It has threatened and, in a way, structurally altered the character and integrity of the future Indian bureaucracy. As a mentor and educator, I have already sensed this over the past five or six years as I saw the nature of the papers and the quality of candidates being selected. One also sees it from the mock interviews of the selected candidates, which are widely available on online portals.

The death of the generalist

The entire architecture of the Indian bureaucracy depends on the concept of the empathetic generalist, as seen in the character of the protagonist, Satish, in U. R. Murthy’s Kannada novella Bara. Bureaucrats face complex governance challenges on the ground. They are not expected to be niche academic researchers. What they need is broad, interdisciplinary understanding of systemic policy issues. For decades, standard, accessible reference works like D.D. Basu’s or P.M. Bakshi’s The Constitution of India served as the democratic baseline for preparing for the Polity section, keeping the exam accessible to candidates regardless of their socio-cultural and economic backgrounds.

The recent prelims paper completely abandoned these baselines, replacing general awareness with absurdity and academic trivia. Take the case of Question 1 (Set D), which forced a highly contrived, cross-disciplinary intersection between the textual geography of the Rigvedic Nadi Sukta, Pleistocene geological shifts, and dolphin evolution. To solve this question in real time, a candidate needs a research background in multiple disciplines. A candidate must either be a postgraduate in historical geography and evolutionary biology or have a nuanced understanding of environmental policy or wildlife conservation frameworks. The real-life candidates, who had spent years studying national legislation, were left paralysed by the hyper-specific and obscure nature of such questions.

Such an approach focusses on interpreting scriptures and mastering theological minutiae while neglecting socio-economic contexts, which ought to be the main focus of the exam. Question 10 of the same set demanded the literal translation of Kshetra-patni. The term is a remote agricultural terminology pulled from the depths of the Atharvaveda. Candidates realised that their exhaustive study of modern land reforms and agricultural economics was useless and inadequate to tackle these theological and religious questions. Instead, it required a mastery of decoding ancient Sanskrit agricultural vocabulary. The terrifying consensus, as I spoke with the aspirants, was that future selections would depend on an uncritical and rote memorisation of ancient scriptural texts. Candidates said that the focus on understanding the living machinery of the Constitution was no longer required for the exam.

The pattern was repeated in the section on art and culture. Question 9 tested an elite and specific classical singer, Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur, of the Jaipur-Atrauli Gharana. It used geographical traps, asking candidates to know niche regional traditions rather than testing their broad appreciation of Indian classical music. Question 11 entered the domain of formal musicology, requiring candidates to directly compare Carnatic music structures with Hindustani frameworks. This is completely unconventional; it demands specialised music training that is completely irrelevant to public administration. One student, trained in Hindustani classical music and an avid listener of Carnatic music, confessed that she too was unable to answer the question.

Even the geography section abandoned conceptual mechanics in favour of foreign trivia, testing alternative local nomenclatures for international UNESCO sites like Lake Turkana. It entirely bypasses the ethos of studying the standard atlas. It instead turns map study into an exercise in memorising obscure local dialects.

The UPSC examination is designed to select secular bureaucratic leaders for a multi-religious democracy. This year’s Preliminary exam prioritised Vedic vocabulary and sectarian musical grammar over fundamental rights and socio-economic history. The institutional intent of the constitutional body, the UPSC, must be gauged. Its focus has clearly shifted from testing a candidate’s understanding of the historical significance of cultural movements to testing deep knowledge of obscure texts. Such academic overkill does not measure intellect; it measures an individual’s capacity to absorb and regurgitate fragmented, scattered data points.

The rise of the casino effect

In standard educational theory, a neutral, free, and fair competitive exam ought to maintain a relationship between preparation and performance. The application of techniques like calculated elimination, deductive logic, and educated reasoning cannot be considered shortcuts. They are the intellectual tools of an analytical mind trained to evaluate probabilities and identify logical inconsistencies. These are precise skills directly translatable to real-world bureaucratic decision-making under intense pressure and uncertainty. In the recent paper, these analytical tools were systematically neutralised, turning the exam into a lottery.

The pinnacle of this crisis was reached in Question 46, asking about the winner of the Nobel Prize. It used an abstract prompt, asking candidates to identify an unnamed individual, Mr. “X”, based almost entirely on his birth in the UK. The question provided no administrative context or historical policy contribution. To add to the absurdity, standard elimination techniques proved ineffective because three of the options had won Nobel Prizes in 2025. It operated as a pure “know-it-or-blind-guess-it” trap, completely devoid of logic.

The above question can be compared to the “banking concept of education” described in Paulo Freire’s famous work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Here, the learners are treated as passive vessels in which the institutional authority deposits scattered fragments of information, dependent on conformity and adaptation. It takes learners away from critical inquiry and active participatory dialogue, as independent thinking could threaten established systems.

The consensus among experts and candidates indicates that around 40 questions in General Studies Paper I relied entirely on pure luck, or tukkebaazi. When nearly 40 per cent of a premier national exam, which selects the administrators who will govern the nation, depends on guesswork, it feels as if the state has effectively abdicated its role in selecting the most capable administrative minds. This structural distortion creates a profound ethical hazard. When a candidate who has dedicated years to mastering economic theory, constitutional law, and international relations is outscored by another who happens to make a series of statistically lucky guesses on arbitrary biographical trivia, the exam ceases to be an instrument of “merit”. It looks instead like a casino, punishing intellectual engagement and rewarding randomness.

Deliberate obfuscation and missing context

An evaluation system based on transparency and accountability relies on clarity and objectivity. It tests whether a candidate knows a concept, not whether they can decipher a riddle under intense psychological pressure. The recent paper, however, repeatedly weaponised semantic ambiguity and withheld vital context to induce panic among the candidates. The strategy was evident in Question 68, on stealth technology. By subtly tweaking scientific parameters to create confusion regarding specific frequencies, the paper-setter forced candidates to guess a hidden, subjective interpretation. It deterred candidates from applying established, objective, and scientific facts. Candidates felt as if they were being evaluated not on their technological literacy but on their capacity for telepathic guessing, compounded by the pressure of the ticking clock.

This lack of transparency extended to the governance and security sections as well. In Questions 84, 96, and 98, the paper used the acronyms of institutions like “UN Peacekeeping Operations” without any baseline context or their expanded forms. It went on to ask questions on highly obscure parliamentary sub-committees and demanded precise operational knowledge of the Indian Army’s 33 Corps. Candidates pointed out that answering questions about niche sub-committees and Army units requires the study of specialised parliamentary or military journals. The paper forgets that it is testing candidates for general knowledge and not for military or Parliamentary expertise.

Infinite syllabus: Weaponising digital repositories

It is generally said that the UPSC syllabus covers all topics under the sky. In general terms, it translates to studying and acquiring knowledge of broad topics in an intersectional manner. But underlying the contemporary examination’s crisis is the algorithmic expansion of its syllabus. In a digitalised governance ecosystem, the state generates an immense volume of data. By drawing questions heavily from the unedited, deep repositories of native Ministry websites, such as regulatory mandates of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) or defunct, outdated advisory committees, as seen in Question 63, the commission seems to have expanded the syllabus to the entirety of the government’s digital footprint.

Rather than work within a defined universe of core concepts, historical milestones, and policy frameworks, it has weaponised the infinite repository of bureaucratic clutter. This shift has severe socio-economic ramifications, especially given the demographics of the civil services. It creates a divide and exclusionary knowledge ecosystem that heavily favours a specific class of candidates. Aspirants from rural, poor, and marginalised communities, who cannot afford elite coaching packages or the luxury of prolonged years of full-time preparation, are at a disadvantage. More importantly, why must candidates at the preliminary stage be familiar with such obscure facts? In what way does it prove a candidate’s eligibility for the civil services?

Cognitively, a normal human mind cannot scan, catalogue, and memorise the deep text of every ministerial repository. But million-dollar coaching conglomerates do possess the capital to deploy data-mining operations, and can quickly turn public service exam preparation into a highly monetised, corporate system. By making the exam dependent on access to these obscure digital footnotes, the UPSC is opening up the entry to high-end private coaching institutes. In a way, it directly undermines the egalitarian promises enshrined in Article 16 of the Constitution and grounded in the spirit of the Right to Equality.

Institutional drift

The shifts observed in this year’s preliminary examination cannot be analysed in a vacuum. They need to be understood within the broader context of a crisis in state capacity. The civil services were designed to be the country’s steel frame. They ought to ensure a politically neutral, secular bureaucracy that would be fiercely committed to institutionalised social justice, constitutional values, and welfare economics.

When an institutional gatekeeper alters its selection criteria to prioritise and promote specific cultural, scriptural, and medieval narratives while bypassing secular, constitutional, and post-Independence history, it signals a deeper crisis. It speaks of ideological manoeuvring. Reducing the space allocated to questions about the freedom movement, peasant and tribal uprisings, labour histories, and constitutional evolution appears to be a deliberate choice. It fundamentally alters the intellectual composition of future administrators.

An examination that rewards uncritical memorisation of obscure sectarian texts and trivial footnotes, while penalising structural and analytical thinking, risks producing a “committed bureaucracy”. It aims to create an administrative cadre that is intellectually compliant and structurally detached from the chaotic realities of people-centric governance at the ground level. An administrator selected via this process is obsessed with scriptural literalism at worst and statistical gambling at best. These administrators will hardly be equipped to handle the complex and deeply pluralistic policy challenges of modern public administration in India.

Historically, the civil services examination has shaped the hopes and life choices of crores of youth. It foregrounds a promise that, through sheer intellectual rigour, dedication, and merit, a person from the most marginalised communities from the most remote corners of the country can rise to the highest echelons of state power. That promise is now endangered. The exam has morphed into one that raises institutional distrust rather than confidence among youth.

The UPSC stands at a critical juncture today. To preserve its fiercely guarded constitutional mandate and institutional integrity, the Commission must urgently undertake a course correction by examining the subtle structural flaws that have crept into its structure. It must rescue the preliminary examination and its successive stages (the Mains and personality test) from the depths of triviality and realign them with its own well-established principles of critical inquiry, administrative relevance, and constitutional morality.

The examination must be returned to its original state, where a logical, comprehensive understanding of public policy formed the criteria for selection. India does not need public servants who excel at guesswork or memorising obscure medieval jargon. It needs empathetic, accountable, reasonable, responsive, and analytically rigorous leaders who can cope with the challenges of the 21st century. The future of the economy, the democracy, and the polity depends entirely on rescuing the future bureaucratic mind from this UPSC drift.

Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule is an alumnus of TISS, an expert in Constitutional law, a Creighton Peden Scholar in the USA, and a Senior Scholar at IIT-Delhi.

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